The Insider News

The Insider News is for breaking IT and Software development news. Post your news, your alerts and
your inside scoops. This is an IT news-only forum - all off-topic, non-news posts will be
removed. If you wish to ask a programming question please post it
here.

Get The Daily Insider direct to your mailbox every day. Subscribe
now!

The following post is a comprehensive summary of the developer-facing changes coming in Java 8. This next iteration of the JDK is currently scheduled for general availability in September 2013. At the time of this writing, Java 8 development is still very much in progress. Language features and APIs may still change. I'll do my best to keep this document up to date.

A comprehensive list of exploits will be available sometime after you deploy...

Short of a gun against my head nothing will convince me to move to either Win 8 or Java 8. In some cultures, the number 8 is a number associated with good fortune. Unfortunately, it's just Microsoft's and Java's bad luck to be stupid enough to name a crap product using the number 8. Both products were born on the banqueting table and both products are worthy of being dumped overboard down the toilet.

I'll steer clear of both like I do avoiding dogs poo on the pavement.

Jave 8? Windows 8? Thanks, but no thanks.

If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

Entertainment value; just like the bit of snark that comes with every other article send out in The Insider.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Right, well this particular one is a partisan straw-man. When was the last time you embedded ActiveX managed code in your page? Probably never--I haven't. It's not as if the ability to run .net code on the client ships with most browsers by default as core functionality. And if such a feature were offered:- The list of 'sploits would be a thousand miles long, and definitely not available before release (as if such an expectation were even reasonable or made sense);- Everyone would turn it off;- It would not count as a strike against the .net platform, but rather against the sandboxing policy in the browser.

I can't wait til HTML5 hits critical mass. Let's see how well the security issues around this are managed by M$. I'm betting on Not Well.

Like it or not of late Java has become known for exploits. Whether it is fair, and whether other systems will have as many problems (HTML5) is not the point. I uninstalled the Java runtime from my home machine. If .NET came with the abiltiy to run client side and had as little use to me and as many problems I might remove that too. Also, if a diet of burgers and beer didn't make me fat I'd be a model.

Until they fix their code and then their PR problem: Java == exploits.

The Java browser plug-in may be exploitable, but not so much "Java" itself. I understand, of course, that the label "Java" gets applied to a bunch of qualitatively different things. But using the label to cloud and misrepresent matters to users is irresponsible and unethical.

No one likes applets, not even Java people. But almost no one deploys them anyway. The Java platform itself (the back-end: language, JVM, appserver--which, btw, routinely runs on much more secure OSes than the IIS-standard Windows) is less exploitable than the Microsoft equivalent combination (.NET runtime, IIS+Windows OS), and it's this (either intentional or ignorant) implicit false comparison of applets (a marginal use of Java) with _anything_else_ that's incorrect.